An archaeology of “small worlds”: social inequality in early medieval Iberian rural communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper uses the archaeological record to analyse the forms of social inequality that existed within early medieval rural communities. The paper takes as its case study Álava, where there is a significant density of high- resolution archaeological records, making it possible to compare the nature of the changes that took place within various peasant communities, and explore their interactions with active domain structures at the local and supralocal levels. Therefore, a bottom-up multilayer perspective has been used, based on the contrast between the logics of political economy and moral economy. Three main themes are explored: the formation of medieval villages and village communities; the hierarchisation of peasant communities; and the interaction between these communities and the networks of aristocratic power. As opposed to narratives that have analysed this period in terms of the progressive and necessary subjection of the peasantry to the power of lordship, it is concluded that local societies constituted active arenas of negotiation, counter- positioning, and experimentation in the early Middle Ages, which, although barely visible in the written documentation, generated multiple forms of dominance, and asymmetric social cooperation, and conflict.